


Rare Earths

by aderyn



Series: Deep Map [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: geochemistry & the affections
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-06
Updated: 2012-07-06
Packaged: 2017-11-09 06:40:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/452453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Show me some affection, John.”<br/>He's not surprised so much as he's transmogrified. Petrified.<br/>(Holmesite, inert, uncommon, adamantine, industrial use: lasers.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rare Earths

**Author's Note:**

> For [ScienceofObsession](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ScienceofObsession/pseuds/ScienceofObsession), with thanks for the grounding.

 

_~The geochemical divide has put more of the light lanthanides in the Earth's crust, but more of the heavy members in the Earth's mantle. ~The Chinese Society of Rare Earths_

 

“Show me some affection, John.” 

He's not surprised so much as he's transmogrified. Petrified.

It’s a Wednesday morning.  Last night they put a in a custody a man who’d killed over a gem. (Asteriated.)  
  
“Feeling OK?” John says.  
  
“Just show me some affection.”  
  
All right. One hand to the forehead, one to the neck. Right. Good.  
  
“I'm fine,” Sherlock says.  
  
What?  
  
“Just let me...” John’s on his toes, peering into the twin mines.

  
“Not high. Or concussed, either.”  
 **  
**

*******

The earth’s crust is full of them, the rare earths, those elemental martyrs, segregate, on the periodic table held apart.  He’s not. He’s not as separate they think.

Once, when he was weak from loss of blood, John tipped the water up, stroked his neck until he swallowed.

*******

“You’ve never once asked,” says John, “for that.”

The earth’s crust is starred with lonely minerals. Gadolinite, that miracle, that blended whisky of rares, fractures conchoidally—

 incandesces at low heats.  
  


*******

He thinks of them, the lanthanides, the f-blocks, their buried orbits, their single-valence electrons on the d-shell; on the periodic table kept apart.

John glad-hands everyone, still touches him like a scarce thing.

Once, though, when he was lost for a time, John looked in every corner, dug him up, mapped his blackness for an ingress.  How long on the sofa.  A new mineral named for him, the unmoving; that’s how long. ( _Holmesite, inert, uncommon, adamantine, industrial use: lasers.)_

Once (more than once) John has watched him sharding down to pieces, said, _stop--_ laid hands on his arms, breathed with him until he’s gone, a little bit, to ground.

*******

“Why now?” says John.

“Why not?”

“It’s an experiment.”

“I suppose.”

“In affection,” John says.

“In asking.”

*******

Years of experiments, of chemistry, of excavation—

Piles of pale oxides uncovered.

Lutetia spawned lutetium and became Paris; Sweden yielded yttrium; devotion yielded praseodymium, neodymium, dysprosium (the hard to get.)

Extract them, work them right, and you’ve got phosphors, magnets, contrast, enamels, colorants, electrodes, lenses, catalysts, and ferrocerium firesteel—

No-one touched him as a child.

*******

“Really,” John says, when he puts his hands on Sherlock’s arms and sets him down.  “I don’t know if you’re all right. But really,” John says, “it isn’t all that that hard.”

“Here,” John says, “come here.”

*******

Gadolinite (that blended whisky of rares) is pyrogenic, incandescent, vitreous, unearthed in the north—and luminous, miraculous, beautiful, rare.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Dysprosium-- from the Greek dysprositos,”hard to get”  
> Lanthanides-- form the Greek lanthanein, “to lie hidden”  
> Holmium--a rare earth element of the lanthanide series, named, sadly, for the city of Stockholm rather than for Mr. Holmes. (Notable quality: too reactive to be found uncombined in nature .)  
> Gadolinite(Ce,La,Nd,Y)2FeBe2Si2O10 )--a silicate mineral which consists principally of the silicates of the cerium, lanthanum, neodymium, yttrium, beryllium, and iron.  
> Holmesite--sadly, not a real mineral. 
> 
>    
> [The British Geological Survey Geoindex](http://www.bgs.ac.uk/geoindex/home.html)  
> [British Geological Survey –rare earth-rich rocks in Scotland, images](http://www.bgs.ac.uk/mineralsuk/exploration/potential/home.html#REE)


End file.
